Archive for the ‘Teleportation’ Category

I’ve written on teleportation before and felt that I should add a bit of information and summarize. There are four ways to accomplish teleportation (or body debit as ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ called it). None of these are ready for prime time today but it is possible that one of these will happen within the next 100 years.

Biological Deconstruction, Mapping, Transmission and Reconstruction
This is one of the more common explanations for matter transporters. A layer by layer decomposition and mapping, then data or ionized particle stream transmission to a receiver that then reconstructs the biological entity. such an ion transmission might be possible but would require each ion to be displace in space and time from each other ion to minimize the mutual repulsion that could jumble the ions at the receiver end. The ions would have to all have the same charge, be sorted by atomic weight and all transmitted with the same velocity. Additionally you don’t want to lose any. The real problem here is you are doing reconstruction at the atomic level. There are several things wrong with this approach not the least of which is it is likely impossible to build complex biological proteins this way and even if it was possible it would take far too long. This might be simplified by transmitting structural information, then have an extensive library of generic biological components at the receiver end to use in a 3-D printer. The following references give a sneak preview of how that might be done:

Brain Deconstruction, Mapping and Transmission to an Android body.
Of course, if we have this scan we have the neuron connectome (in theory) so we can become an android instead and skip the 3-D printer step. The brain connectome can be downloaded into a computer brain emulation that by this time should easily fit in an android body. This being can then live in an android body or in in virtual space. Of even greater interest, this being can travel in space without the human support system, can be transmitted from one place to another at the speed of light with electromagnetic radiation, and has an indefinite life span. This may be an option for humans within 75 to 100 years.

Warp Drive
The third way is warping space so the transmission point and the receiving point are the same. This can be accomplished by creating a wormhole from point A to point B with perfectly flat event horizons at both ends. The technology and energy requirements put this into the far distant future, if at all.

Using Time Machines
The forth way is using time machines. We start out by shipping a time machine from point A to point B. The time machine was stationed at point A before and up to time t0 and arrived at point B at t1. At point A we also have a time machine that whizzes you into the future. To get from point B to point A we enter the time machine at point B at time t2 > t1, set it go go back to a time before t0 and zap we are at point A. We then enter the future time machine and set it for t2 and zap we are still at point A but now we have instantly travelled from point B to point A even if it is accross the Galaxy. The energy requirements? Don’t ask.

In a previous post I stated Faster Than Light (FTL) Drives are impossible considering the energy that it would take to warp space. I now have second thoughts If a time machine can be constructed. Professor Ronald Mallett in 1999 showed that using Einstein’s general Theory of Relativity it’s possible by creating closed timelike curves. Stephen Hawking. however, proved this impossible without exotic matter with negative energy. Olum and Everett argued that with current laser technology the laser ring would be the size of the known Universe. Even with these detractors I’m not ruling this out in the far future.

Now, given a time machine, how do you achieve FTL? My first approximation is to have a time machine at the destination and the passengers go into stasis for the journey and upon arrival go into the time machine and come out when they left. Due to stasis and time dilation (traveling close to the speed of light) they have aged very little. They have already beat the clock but now comes the tricky part.

They decide on a return trip to Earth so they get into the time machine again and go back in time to when the machine was still on Earth. They pop out and are back on Earth way before they left. Very weird, but the time machine has become an FTL drive on the way back without going anywhere. Note that it is also a teleportation machine. The odd part of this is it has to work if time machines are to work at all since the reference frame of the time machine shouldn’t make any difference. If it did, the Earth rotation and its orbiting the Sun would cause the time machine to malfunction. There is no such thing as an absolute coordinate in space. I guess I will have to allow FTL drives and teleportation if I allow time machines in distant future fiction.

It’s called a lot of things besides teleportation: matter transmission, matter transporter, teleportion, beam up, beam down (Star Trek), body debit (Hitchhiker’s Guide) but they all amount to the same thing. An object disappears from one location and shows up at another. The most obvious problem with the Star Trek version there is no matter receiver. The object is assembled in thin air out of thin air. There is no conceivable way this can be accomplished outside of ESP.

IN 2003 the Air Force concluded a study done by Eric W Davis examining the theoretical possibility of teleportation. In particular, generating a flat faced wormhole (Stargate) using one of four schemes for generating the required negative energy. As in the FTL Drive case we are likely talking about needing energies of galactic proportions.

The usual Star Trek version would require 10**31 bytes of information to encode all the information for the reconstruction of one person. That would be ten trillion terabytes. Certainly shortcuts and various compression schemes will cut this down by an order of magnitude or more. It’s still enough 1″ thick terabyte disk drives to circle the Earth side-by-side 1000 times. And decomposing a human into a matter stream and sending them near the speed of light to a receiver? Forget about it! The real problem with this approach is the Heisenberg quantum uncertainty principle which shows that you can’t measure a number of complementary quantum properties simultaneously. The measuring device will substantially interfere with the measurements themselves.

Oddly, Eric does consider the possibility of an ESP matter transporter thinking that the documented experiments in this area in China and Russia might be valid. I have my doubts. Scientists are the easiest people in the world to fool and since money is usually involved many are inclined to fool themselves. Consider, that scientists generally deal with data from nature. Nature isn’t trying to fool anyone, having no intelligence she lays her data out there for all to see. People, however, have motives and those with motives to fool others are often successful. I’m not saying ESP events don’t exist but rather extraordinary precautions must be taken when testing for them. In particular, I believe any study of people who apparently show telekinetic abilities should have an accomplished magician on their staff. Uri Geller was unable to perform in the presence of Johnny Carson (an accomplished magician himself). Watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9w7jHYriFo. Sorry Eric, I think you are wasting your time trying to stretch QM to cover ESP. At least, not until we really see some controlled, repeatable experiments that are foolproof. As a result, I ignore this kind of teleportation in my stories.

There is another form of teleportation of ‘humans’ that I believe will be in every day use 100 years from now. Within the lifetime of some humans living now we will be able to capture the entire neural network of a human and emulate it in hardware. In other words humans who choose to will at first become virtual people then when android bodies are good enough they will be android people. Their entire mental being can then be transmitted to another location, even using todays technology, and be loaded into another android body and you are there. A complete mental state will likely take 15 petabytes but if that person is a frequent visitor to that location perhaps only an update will need to be sent. This will happen sooner than most people think and it will be, as Ray Kurtzweil put it, a singularity in intelligence and human evolution.